Three Factors That Make a Team Promotion-Friendly

Welcome to my newsletter! I'm Dave Anderson, an ex-Amazon Tech Director and GM. I write this newsletter I've called Scarlet Ink, which is a weekly newsletter on tech industry careers and tactical leadership advice.

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I was promoted in the Payments organization from Level 5 to Level 6 after 2 years. I'd say my promotion was a combination of being pushy (insisting to each of my 3 managers over 2 years that I wanted to be promoted quickly), and competence. Most of my peers were already level 6, so being a competent peer should make a promotion at that level easy.

Then I switched teams, purposefully choosing a position where I think I can get promoted.

I was promoted in the Retail Marketplace organization from Level 6 to Level 7 after 2 years. That was a relatively quick promotion. Many elements went into it, but a key element was that I picked an opportunity for promotion.

A few years of distraction go by, and I'm in AWS Networking. I'm not thrilled with Networking (I unfortunately find it boring), so I search for a new position where I think I can get promoted again. I find an opportunity in the Devices organization.

After 3 years in the Devices organization, I'm promoted from Level 7 to Level 8. Again, many elements went into this promotion, but the same key element remained. I'd purposefully picked an opportunity ripe for promotion.

I've touched on elements of these choices in the past, but never wrote a concrete explanation of what I think worked about these choices.

It's not like I can just give someone a checklist, and that guarantees them career growth. But so many of my peers didn't even think about some of these things. They'd repeatedly and blindly join teams that (in my opinion) were obviously not great for career growth. And then they were surprised years later that they weren't making progress.

Let me leave an obvious disclaimer. There are plenty of people in this economy looking for any open roles. Not everyone has the opportunity to choose carefully between opportunities. Regardless, I think it's still valuable to share.

Let's get into the three aspects of this process.

One - You need to create impact.

I think people can get distracted by roles that look like a promotion on a plate.

Let's say you're a senior engineer, and you see an open role to be the tech lead for the AWS S3 engineering team. Holy crap, you think to yourself, S3 is huge. Clearly, this is an opportunity for promotion. The tech lead for S3 should be a principal engineer.

Well, it might be! However, S3 is a very mature business. There were many promotions given as it was originally built. And probably more as it scaled to 1000x what was originally planned.

However, I've seen people take outsized roles in some of these mature businesses, and they've struggled to show their personal growth. Simply keeping S3 running isn't the best promotion criteria. You need to show impact, and babysitting a steady state business makes that a bit difficult. (No offense to S3 folk. They're probably doing great engineering work there. But you made for a simple example.)

The best promotion stories are stories, and stories have an arc. "The X was here (hand low), and then the X went here! (hand high)."

I'm not saying that quickly growing teams are the only path to promotion, but you need an opportunity to show impact. Showing impact in a period of growth is certainly easier than showing impact in a period of stability.

For me, both Marketplace and Devices were teams that were small when I was hired but had open headcount and some big projects on the horizon. This meant I could prove that I personally scaled these teams to success. This was a path to an obvious impact story.